I’m finding thatP2PU offers a fascinating space in which to operate. It’s a space with ethos but little structure. I’m building as I go. And wondering, from time to time, if this course meets my general metric for success in all that I do as a teacher – is it useful? Are people getting what they need from the course?

There were many wonderful moments at ISTE this year! One of them was the closing keynote by Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia. That evening we invited Chris, Bud Hunt, and four teachers from SLA -- Diana Laufenberg, Zac Chase, Matt VanKouwenberg, and Larissa Pahomov -- to join us at Rembrandt's Restaurant (aka SLA North) to reflect on ISTE and whatever else they wanted to talk about.

Enjoy the SLA students and Chris Lehmann's speech in this video, check out his reflections, and listen to our conversation. Enjoy!

Chris Lehmann's ISTE Keynote - Process and Impressions: I gave the closing keynote at ISTE on Wednesday, and it was a really wonderful experience. It's an amazing thing to get up in front of 5,000 plus people and talk about what you deeply believe. It was particularly hard for two reasons - one, the ISTE community is as close to a "home-base" outside of SLA that I have in the world of education. There are so many people - too numerous to mention here - who have been friends, co-learners, mentors, sounding boards over the past six years that to speak in front of all of them in one place was both exhilarating and a little intimidating... and many of them had heard me speak at other events, so finding something new for that segment of the audience was a real challenge. But the real reason it was so hard to craft this speech was because I was preceded by my students. (Read the rest of this post on Practical Theory - A View from the Classroom.

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers,
Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan catch up with two other
National Writing Project teachers, Bud Hunt and Gail Desler.

First we talk to Bud about his conversation at this year EduCon 2.3.
We encourage you to follow the links at the bottom of this description
from the EduCon site (I hope we did our "linktrubition" correctly here!):

Dr. Remix; or how I learned to stop worrying and love citationBrowse recordings:livestream.com/educon8Who: Bud Hunt, St. Vrain Valley School District (CO) and Joe Bires, Haddonfield School District (NJ)Conversation Description:
This presentation is an extension of a Twitter conversation in
response to a keynote presentation at ISTE 2010. One presenter felt that
he was witnessing an act of plagiarism, while the other felt he was
seeing remix in action. Their constructive disagreement is worth
further exploration.
Clearly, there are many differing views on the role of proper use of the
work of others. What is the place of citation in the work we are doing
with students and others? When should you cite? How? What does a
digital citation, or "linktribution" as Alan Levine calls it, look like
online?
Perhaps you never thought about it or perhaps you never considered
the issue in its totality. This discussion will raise your awareness of
this issue that fundamentally affects us because ideas are at the core
of all of our curricula. Through citation, we ask students to connect
ideas together and create new ones, but the issue of citation masks the
fundamental question of the relationship between ideas and their
creators.
Websites: http://www.budtheteacher.com - http://edtechleadership.com - http://bit.ly/drremix

Next up in the podcast, Gail Desler brings us up to date on here work
as a technology integrator in the Elk Grove (CA) Unified School
District. Among other things, Gail describes why she loves Audacity so
much, and here's some of how she puts it in her wonderful Edublog, BlogWalker:

The appeal of Audacity to students is that they can edit all or just parts of a recording. For the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of observing Teresa Cheung’s
4th graders delve into Audacity to edit their Stories from Heart audio
interviews. Once students see how easy it is to zoom in and delete an
“er” or “um,” or shorten a pause, or amplify a section that’s too low,
or remove background noise, etc., they become active sound editors. I
love watching the confidence level of ELLs grow, as they relax, knowing
how easy it is to redo words or even a single word until they’re
satisfied with the output.
But more importantly, as Teresa’s students listen, for instance, to Chase’s mother explain how she came to be born by a waterfall, or Devina’s grandmother talk about growing up in Berkeley in the ’50s, or Anthony’s mother
talk about her childhood days escaping Laos, the students take pride
in sharing and preserving family stories, cultures, and languages. As
the collection builds, so does the celebration of common threads and
diversity in Ms. Cheung’s classroom, along with an appreciation for the
power of the human voice.

Finally, Paul, Chris, and Susan mull over some of the changes they are planning for Youth Voices.
Within days of this post, Bill Fitzgerald and the other "primates" over
at FunnyMonkey will have finished a re-launch of Youth Voices on their
new Voice Box installation.

The VoiceBox installation profile is designed to
simplify the work of groups looking to create or expand their online
presence. Groups who could use this site range from media organizations
to not-for-profits to schools to advocacy groups. If an organization
wants to build a place for their stakeholders to publish, interact, and
get more informed, then VoiceBox could support that work.

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

46:37 minutes (10.67 MB)
Congratulations to all involved in the National Writing Project’s (NWP) new Digital Is site, which launched the first week of November when we recorded this podcast!

Take a look at all the wonderful work that has been collected and curated so far by NWP teachers from all over the United States at http//digitalis.nwp.org/

Once you’ve checked out those great resources and provocations, listen to the creators, collectors, and curators of this exciting new site on this episode of Teachers Teaching
Teachers.

As Christina Cantrill wirtes:

The National Writing Project’s DigitalIs website is a teaching-focused knowledge base exploring digital
writing, teaching and learning. It invites participation in developing
this knowledge base in several ways – visitors can find a range of
teaching-focused collections and resources here related to digital writing, teaching and learning as well as become community members and participate in discussions. Also, after participating and getting a sense of the site, one can write to us and apply to be a resource creator. Resource creators can draft and compose multimodal resources here, get and give feedback to other resource creators, and publish.

Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan welcomed five of our friends and colleagues to this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers:

Christina Cantrill
who works at the National Writing Project as a Senior Program Associate
for the NWP Technology Initiative and Digital Is project

Kevin Hodgson teaches sixth grade in Southampton, Massachusetts at the William E. Norris
Elementary School. He is also
the technology liaison with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. Check out how many different ways Kevin shows up on Digital Is!

We talked with our friends about the importance of commenting. Over
the last several years, those of us who have been building Youth Voices have learned how important it is to teach and nurture commenting, not just posting new posts all the time.

Join the excitement! Digital Is promises to be an important touchstone for communities of learners in the National Writing Project and beyond, and we suspect that the quality of the discussions on the site will soon be as important as the quality of the resources.

With this episode of TTT, we celebrate the launch of Digital Is and to think about the role of commenting in building new communities of learning on this site.

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